Film director Irena Salina’s documentary entitled Flow: For the Love of Water has been described as water’s version of Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth. The film strives to put a human face on the global water crisis.

“One of the things that became immediately apparent to me was that water is a truly unifying element. We all need it, we all want it and more than anything else in the world it is the one thing that connects us all – Irena Salina.

If you live in or near the Vancouver, Canada area and would like to check out the documentary, it will begin showing on December 12th, 2008 at the Vancity Theatre. Go see it right away because it’s only in Vancouver for a week!

Vancity Theatre

1181 Seymour St., Vancouver

tel. (604) 683-3456

In the meantime, you can check out the website here for more information and background on the people who made the documentary and how it was made.

Irena Salina’s award-winning documentary investigation into what experts label the most important political and environmental issue of the 21st Century – The World Water Crisis. Salina builds a case against the growing privatization of the world’s dwindling fresh water supply with an unflinching focus on politics, pollution, human rights, and the emergence of a domineering world water cartel. Interviews with scientists and activists intelligently reveal the rapidly building crisis, at both the global and human scale, and the film introduces many of the governmental and corporate culprits behind the water grab, while begging the question “CAN ANYONE REALLY OWN WATER?” Beyond identifying the problem, FLOW also gives viewers a look at the people and institutions providing practical solutions to the water crisis and those developing new technologies, which are fast becoming blueprints for a successful global and economic turnaround.

Water is a mysterious but crucial substance. Its origins and properties still evoke debate, despite its existence by some accounts dating back 3.8 Billion years. Its forms alone are worthy of investigation. Water is the only substance whose solid form is less dense than its liquid, carrying tremendous implications for aquatic life. In any of its forms, it can not be created, destroyed, nor leave the earth. As such, it exists in a closed cycle known as the hydrosphere. In the hydrological cycle, water circles through the earths system of reservoirs. These reservoirs are numerous and well known, including: atmosphere (clouds and rain), oceans, lakes, rivers, ground water, icecaps, saturated soil and subterranean aquifers. The water moves between these various reservoirs through the process of evapotranspiration, a name used to encompass the processes of evaporation (from oceans), sublimation (from lakes/rivers) and transpiration (from vegetation).

Figure 1. The hydrological cycle. (Trenberth et al. 2006a).

Between the numerous reservoirs, just how much water exists on the earth is a difficult number to determine. It is impossible to know exactly. Water trapped below the surface and that locked in ice caps and perma frost can never be measured exactly. One of the best known estimates comes from Igor Shikloanov from the State Hydrological Institute in St. Petersburg. His self admittedly crude estimate hits the 1.4 billion cubic km mark. However, this huge number is misleading if not understood. To represent that amount that is available for human consumption, more than 97% must be removed because ocean water is too salty to drink or use for irrigation. A remaining 2.5% , or about 35 million cubic km is found in a freshwater state. Unfortunately, this figure too requires further reduction. At any one time, a small percent of the total is in the form of rain, clouds, fog or tied up in the biosphere. An even more noteworthy chunk occupies 75% of the small freshwater total, locked and unusable in polar ice caps and tundra snow cover. Freshwater lakes and rivers, the renewable source we are concerned about preserving is a mere 90 000 cubic kilometers (a mere .26% of an already small 2.5% source).

A mere 0.26 percent of the water on Earth is drinkable.

Marg De Villers, author of award winning Water, creates a vivid image to make the numbers more manageable. If all the worlds water was to be held in a 5L container, the usable freshwater source would occupy only a teaspoon.

When we know what we are working with, the need for conservation and proper management becomes overwhelmingly apparent.